The Favoured Child (40 page)

I walked up to the horse’s neck and stroked him, looking up at Ralph.

‘Have you been ill?’ he asked softly.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I was not allowed out. They were afraid to let me.’

‘No need,’ he said gently, and I felt the tension and the pain of the last few days start to let me go, like cords slipping away from around my neck and shoulders.

‘I have to go to Bath,’ I said abruptly. It sounded like a sentence of doom. Ralph glanced at me, his eyes warm, full of sympathy. ‘They will take me to see a doctor,’ I said. ‘They think that I am unbalanced because of the dreams, and because of the night of the storm!’

Ralph made a little grimace. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘I suppose they would.’ He said nothing for a moment. ‘No doctor of any sense will meddle with you, Julia,’ he said gently. ‘Anyone can see you are a bright and lovely young woman. Any doctor with half a mind would see that you have special gifts, special powers, and you should be glad of them. You should let them flow through you like a river through the arches of a bridge.’

‘I cannot,’ I said urgently. ‘I am to be a young lady. I cannot be as fey as some half-mad gypsy. I am not the village midwife. I am not a teller of fortunes. All of the seeing and dreaming will have to go. I have to move in society. I have to be the wife of a squire!’

Ralph pursed his mouth as if he were about to spit; but then he remembered where he was and thought better of it. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said with exaggerated courtesy. ‘For a moment I forgot that you had such a glorious future ahead of you. A young lady in society indeed! Well, that is worth a few sacrifices, I should say!’ He looked down at my wan face, and the harsh humour left his eyes. ‘You are Quality born and bred,’ he said more gently. ‘If you want to run from the wildness that is in you, if you want to knock it out of yourself, then you may be able to do that. You
may
be able to turn yourself into a bread-and-butter Bath miss. I should think not. But I could be wrong. If anywhere could do it, then Bath can!’

The tone of disgust in his voice was too much for me. I giggled. ‘Have you ever been to Bath?’ I asked smiling.

‘Aye,’ Ralph said. ‘They didn’t make me into a proper young lady either! But they’d have a better chance with you.’ He captured my hand where it was patting his horse’s neck and held it in a comforting clasp. ‘Follow your heart,’ he said gently. ‘I think this land is the place for you, and I think you are Beatrice’s heir. But John and your mama want different things for you. It is you who will have to live the life you choose – none of us. Try the taste of Bath – see how it suits you. Then come home to us if you like Wideacre best.’

I nodded. Ralph’s wisdom was as simple as grass growing.

‘I am afraid of this doctor,’ I confessed.

Ralph’s gentle touch turned into a handclasp as if we were shaking on a deal. ‘While I am alive, no one will coerce you,’ he said briefly. ‘That is a promise.’

I looked up at him and I had a sudden sharp ringing sound in my head. ‘There will come a time when you will not be able to help me,’ I said certainly, in a voice which was not my own. ‘There will come a time when I will not be able to help you.’

I fell silent and Ralph said nothing, waiting patiently in case there was more. ‘That will be a dark hour for the two of us,’ he said. ‘But it is not here now. Don’t be afraid of the future, little Julia. Take your present life and live it.’ He was about to turn his horse away when he checked and put his hand in his pocket. ‘I brought a present for you,’ he said casually. He lifted the pocket flap and brought out something hidden in his broad clenched hand. I reached up for it.

It was a little wooden carved owl, warm from the warmth of his body, carved in a pale wood; hard and smooth-polished.

‘Ralph,’ I said, entranced. ‘Did you make it yourself? For me?’

‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I’m a gypsy’s lad, remember? I was up at the camp the other day, and I borrowed their tools for a while. You should be grateful I didn’t bring you a bag of clothes-pegs too.’

I giggled at that. But as my fingers closed around the little wooden owl, I felt a long shudder sway me, a calling from the past, from Beatrice. ‘You gave her an owl,’ I said with certainty.

Ralph’s glance at me was sharp. ‘If you were mad, you could not know that,’ he said. ‘No one knew of it but her and me. No one could have told you. I gave her an owl for love of her, on her birthday the year we were lovers, and she called it “Canny” for wisdom. I sent her a little china owl in hatred one year to frighten her when we were enemies, after she had lost all her wisdom and skill. And now I give a little wooden owl to you, her heir, with my love. To remind you to keep your wisdom as well as you can.’

‘I will,’ I said with all my heart. ‘Thank you, Ralph. You are so…’ I groped for the word. ‘You are so
sweet
to me.’

Ralph looked utterly thunderstruck. ‘I must be nearing my dotage,’ he said in disgust. ? beddable wench like you finds me
sweet?
Good God!’ And he turned his horse’s head at once and waved farewell to me, still muttering.

‘Goodbye, Ralph!’ I called after him, happy as only he could make me. ‘I’ll be home for ploughing!’

I don’t know if he heard me. His horse’s hooves were loud on the frost-hard ground, but he left me with a smile on my face, an
escape from my fear…and a little wooden owl safe in the palm of my hand.

I went back to the house to pack and dress for the journey. The gong went for breakfast and Mama ate her meal with a list and a pencil by her plate, there was so much to remember.

We were late leaving, the boxes had to be finally corded up and tied on the back of the chaise. Mama forgot a novel she wanted and I had to run back in to fetch it, and she had a hundred things to tell Stride before she was ready to put both hands out of the window to John and say, ‘Goodbye, God bless you, and don’t work too hard.’

He kissed both her hands and then stepped up to the window and kissed her on the lips. ‘God speed, Celia,’ he said gently. ‘Don’t buy a queen’s wardrobe, and come home soon.’

Richard was on my side of the carriage. ‘I hope you will get better,’ he said, his voice light and insincere.

I nodded.

‘If you are unwell and you stay in Bath, they will accept me as the squire in Acre, won’t they?’ he asked. ‘They believe you have the sight, but they know that I am the favoured child?’

I did not have the energy to defend myself. ‘They will come to like you more and more,’ I said wearily, ‘and anyway, they will come to think that the sight means nothing.’

I looked at him, scanning his face for a hint of kindliness towards me, for the love I had trusted all my childhood and girlhood. Richard, stone-faced Richard, smiled again his complacent smile and stepped back from the carriage window. ‘I shall make Acre mine while you are gone,’ he said. ‘I have been waiting for my time. The hall will be how I have planned it, and Acre will come to my hand. I do indeed hope you soon feel well, Julia, but I dare say you will be there for months. Goodbye.’

‘We are joint heirs,’ I said in a sharp undertone. ‘The land will always be partly mine.’

Richard smiled, a smile like midsummer skies. ‘I shan’t regard it,’ he said sweetly. ‘And you don’t know the law, my clever little cousin. If they commit you to an asylum, you are disinherited at
once. Did you not know that, my dear? If you go on with your seeings and your dreamings, you will lose everything.’

I could feel my eyes widen until I was blind with terror. ‘No,’ I said under my breath, but already Richard’s face was wavering in a haze. The carriage moved forward before I could call out a denial, a denial of everything he said. All I could do was to lean forward and see Richard, my stunningly handsome cousin Richard, with his dark curls and his bright blue eyes, standing arms akimbo in the lane as if he owned every inch of the land outright.

T
he journey from Wideacre to Bath took two days of hard travelling. If I had not been sick to my very heart and missing my home from the moment we left the estate, I should have enjoyed it: the bustle of the coaching inns when we changed the horses, the steep wide slopes of the great plain around Salisbury, the rocking motion of the carriage which lulled me to sleep and then woke me again with a jolt, and Mama, fresh in a new bonnet, stepping into coffee-rooms and dining-rooms as if she had been a lady of means every day of her life.

The best part of the journey was across the humped back of southern England. It was good country, not unlike our downland scenery. Lower, of course; for whoever could build a carriage road over the top of my high and lovely downs? But rolling, and sweet and green, with that special springy grass which grows when the roots are in pale earth on a bedrock of chalk. The streams were clear and sweet too, with the clarity of water flowing cleanly off chalk. My mouth watered to taste them and I had a sudden pang of longing for a glass of Wideacre water.

They farmed sheep there in great flocks, and for much of the way the road was unfenced; the white-faced sheep had learned to scurry out of the way of the stage-coach when the guard blew on his horn. Even here the mania for wheat was gripping the farmers, and I saw many fields which had been newly cut from the free long sheep-runs and fenced and ploughed, ready for spring sowing.

I liked the drive and watching the scenery. I liked listening to Jem spinning yarns about us to the ostlers in the coaching inns. And I enjoyed listening to Mama promising me the treats I should have in Bath.

But it was no good, and I could not make it good. I felt I was in disgrace. I felt I was on trial. When Mama glanced anxiously at me when I woke from a half-dreaming sleep, my head against the soft squabs of the coach, I flushed for fear that I might have spoken aloud, for fear that she might have seen my eyelids flutter in my sleep, for fear that she thought that I had been dreaming again.

We shared a bedchamber for the night we stopped on the road in a coaching inn just before Salisbury. I woke in the night with Mama’s hand gentle on my shoulder and her face grave under her nightcap.

‘What is it?’ I said, still bemused from sleep and from a dream I had had of being a little girl again on Wideacre, playing with a lad as dark-haired as Richard and with a smile as roguish.

‘You were dreaming,’ she said low. ‘And you spoke in your sleep. You said, “Ralph.”‘

I raised myself up on one arm and stretched out a hand to her. ‘It does not matter, Mama,’ I said earnestly. ‘I was thinking of the apple trees, of something I had to say to Mr Megson. That was all.’

She nodded. ‘I am sorry to have woken you, then,’ she said tentatively. ‘John said…’ she hesitated. ‘John said that perhaps it would be better if you did not sleep and have your…your dreams, for a little while. He thinks they overtax your imagination.’

I nodded; I kept my eyes down. ‘It does not matter, Mama,’ I said again, and I knew I sounded surly.

‘No,’ she said softly. She went to her travelling bag and brought out the little bottle of medicine which I had come both to love and to dread. ‘Perhaps you should take some of this,’ she said.

I sighed, resigned, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. I swallowed the medicine to please her and waited for the familiar dreamy sense of unreality to overtake me. They were robbing me of my dreams, of my very being. They were dissolving the strange unpredictable part of me in the golden syrup so I lost my clear
bright dream-given wisdom, and learned instead of a dozy unreality.

‘G’night,’ I said, the drug clogging my speech. Mama kissed me on the forehead as I lay down, and crossed back to her own bed and slipped between the covers.

‘Goodnight again,’ she said sweetly; and then, under her breath so I could hardly hear her, she added, ‘God bless you and keep you safe.’

She had booked us some lodgings in Gay Street, Bath. ‘It was just being built when my mama married Lord Havering and we came to Havering Hall,’ she told me as we rattled along the last few miles on the high road over the hills towards the city. ‘I dare say I shall be completely lost. We used to live near to the baths for my own papa to take the water and to bathe. Even when I was a little girl, the whole place was changing almost every day, it seemed. Since then they have built street after street.’

‘Yes,’ I said. I was looking from the carriage window down the hill. The broad river, a little faster and deeper than usual from the winter rains, was spilling over its banks into the water-meadows. The willow trees stood in water, their sparse branches reflected and the grey sky above them. The Fenny would be in flood too, I thought.

‘Richard would love to see the buildings,’ Mama said. ‘We must ask him and John to come and visit us, at least for a few days, as soon as we are settled and you have seen Dr Phillips.’

‘Yes,’ I said again.

‘And the shops are certain to be wonderful,’ Mama said. She was leaning forward on her seat to look ahead down the road. Even in my drug-given stupidity, I could not help but smile at her eagerness. The carriage brakes went on as we turned down a steep hill and Mama gasped at the view. The city was a sea of gold like some new Jerusalem set down on a plain of sunshine. The abbey in the middle dominated the town, with its tall tower reaching up to touch the very floor of heaven; and gathered all around it like square pats of dairy butter were the houses in the lemon-rind paleness of the Bath stone.

We rattled over the bridge and at once Jem on the box checked the horses and brought them to a nervous walk. The streets were impossibly crowded, and I did not see how we should find our way through at all. Everywhere there were sedan chairs, Bath chairs, swaying perilously as sweating brawny chairmen trotted like mad pedlars, one in front, one behind. Many of the chairs had the curtains drawn, but in one or two I caught a glimpse of blankets and towels and a pale white face, and in another a red-faced dandy snoring. There were street-sellers shouting and link-boys and crossing-sweepers jostling at the roadside. There were pedlars spreading their packs out on the pavements, and a tooth-drawer with a stool and a bloodstained apron. And in the doorways were beggars with bitter ingratiating smiles and scabby hands held out, and little children on their knees flushed rosy red with some disease of the skin.